Archive for October 20th, 2008

So we get to the exciting conclusion of my essays on the inclusion of employees in enterprise search. If you’ve read this far, you know how I have characters the first and second generation solutions and also provided a description of a third generation solution (which included some details on how we implemented it).

Here I will describe what I think of as a fourth generation solution to people finding within the enterprise. As I mentioned in the description of the third generation solution, one major omission still at this point is that the only types of searches with which you can find people is through administrative information – things like their name, address, phone number, user ID, email, etc.

This is useful when you have an idea of the person you’re looking for or at least the organization in which they might work. What do you do when you don’t know the person and may not even know the organization in which they work? You might know the particular skills or competencies they have but that may be it. This problem is particularly problematic in larger organizations or organizations that are physically very distributed.

The core idea with this type of solution is to provide the ability to find and work with people based on aspects beyond the administrative – the skills of the people, their interests, perhaps the network of people with which they interact, and more. While this might be a simplification, I think of this as expertise location, though that, perhaps, most cleanly fits into the first use case described below.

Some common use cases for this type of capability include:

Peer-to-peer connections – an employee is trying to solve a particular problem and they suspect someone in the company may have some skills that would enable them to solve the problem more quickly. Searching using those skills as keywords would enable them to directly contact relevant employees.

Resource planning – a consulting organization needs to staff a particular project and needs to find specific people with a particular skill set.

Skill assessment – an organization needs to be able to ascertain the overall competency of their employees in particular skill sets to identify potential training programs to make available.

This capability is something that has often been discussed and requested at my current employer, but which no one has really been willing to sponsor. That being said, I know there are several vendors with solutions in this space, including (at least – please share if you know of others):

Connectbeam – A company I first found out about at KM World 2007. They had some interesting technology on display that combines expertise location with the ability to visualize and explore social networks based on that expertise. Their product could digest content from a number of systems to automatically discern expertise.

ActiveNet – A product from Tacit Software, which (at a high level) is similar to Connectbeam. An interesting twist to this product is that it leaves the individuals whose expertise are managed in the system in control of how visible they are to others. In the discussions I’ve had with this company about the product, I’ve always had the impression that, in part, this provides a kind of virtual mailing list functionality where you can contact others (those with the necessary expertise) by sending an email without knowing who it’s going to. Those who receive it can either act on it or not and, as the sender, you only know who replies.

Another product about which I only know a bit is from a company named Trampoline Systems. I heard about them as I was doing some research on how to tune a prototype system of my own and understand that their Sonar platform provides similar functionality.

[Edit: Added this on 03 November, 2008] I have also found that Recommind provides expertise location functionality – you can read more about it here.

[Edit: Added this on 03 November, 2008] I also understand that the Inquira search product provides expertise location, though it’s not entirely clear to me from what I can find about this tool how it does this.

A common aspect of these is that they attempt to (and perhaps succeed) in automating the process of expertise discovery. I’ve seen systems where an employee has to maintain their own skill set and the problem with these is that the business process to maintain the data does not seem to really embed itself into a company – inevitably, the data gets out of date and is ill-maintained and so the system does not work.

I can not vouch for the accuracy of these systems but I firmly believe that if people search in the enterprise is going to meet the promise of enabling people to find each other and connect based on of-the-moment needs (skills, interests, areas of work, etc), it will be based on this type of capability – automatically discovering those aspects of a worker based on their work products, their project teams, their work assignments, etc.

I imagine within the not too distant future, as we see more merger of the “web 2.0″ functionality into the enterprise this type of capability will become expected and welcome – it will be exciting to see how people will work together then.

This brings to a close my discussion of the various types of people search within the enterprise. I hope you’ve found this of interest. Please feel free to let me know if you think I have any omissions or misstatements in here – I’m happy to correct and/or fill in.

I plan another few posts that discuss a proof of concept I have put together based around the ideas of this fourth generation solution – look for those soon!